Sex offender.
They hadn’t picked someone to go in and scare her or beat her or even kill her.
They’d picked someone to go in and rape her.
Boone had tripped Bogart’s trigger, and maybe Ryn had too.
This was payback.
“Boone.”
Boone didn’t move because now his skin wasn’t itching, it was so tight all over his body, it felt like if he moved, he’d shatter.
“Boone!” Hawk clipped.
He came to and focused on his boss.
“Keep your shit,” Hawk ordered.
“I’m keeping my shit,” Boone lied.
“No, you’re not,” Hawk returned.
No, he wasn’t.
He wanted to kill somebody.
And he had two targets.
Boone stared into the man’s eyes and he did this for several long beats.
When he got his shit together, he jerked up his chin.
Hawk relaxed.
He heard Aug getting Axl up to date, but he kept his eyes on Hawk because he sensed his boss wasn’t done.
So he prompted, “And?”
“And Eddie and Hank went to go talk to Tony Crowley’s widow. She’s a vise.”
Slowly, Boone’s gaze went to Eddie and Hank.
“They got to her,” Eddie said. “She’s got kids. She was twitchy as fuck. Terrified we were there. Terrified we were asking about Tony. Terrified we were asking about Tony maybe investigating someone off the books.”
Hank picked it up. “Hawk called it in on his way from Mamá’s, and we made a call too. Cisco’s sister described her stalker to a sketch artist. Fits to a T a con Bogart nailed, but he alibied out on every incident she reported. So they couldn’t do anything.”
“Or the cops investigating didn’t want anything done,” Boone offered an alternate scenario.
Hank’s lips thinned.
“This doesn’t seem smart to me,” Mag stated. “Something’s wrong with it, because if they keep picking perps that Mueller and Bogart brought down, somewhere along the line, someone is going to connect the dots, say, like we just did.”
“It’d be a good way for the higher-ups to keep them in line,” Hawk noted.
“But they’re fools to allow it,” Boone replied.
“They might have no choice,” Hawk said. “It might not be them making those selections. It might be others making those selections, so in turn, Mueller and Bogart are puppets.”
That was true.
Boone decided to share what he put together on the way there because if he was right, it was crucial steps were taken…now.
“I think Cisco has a rat in his crew,” he stated.
“Worked that out, did you?” Hawk muttered.
And yeah.
Of course Hawk had already come to that conclusion.
“I called Mamá on the way here too,” Hawk shared. “She was pondering this same situation, how Ryn was suddenly a target, and the only person we know who knew Cisco spoke to her, how long he spoke to her, and how that might have gone down was Corinne Morton, and guys from his crew. It could have been Corinne who shared. But from what you reported happened when Mueller and Bogart questioned Ryn, they wouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion.”
Boone nodded.
Hawk continued, “Mamá is going to have a chat with Cisco.”
Mag had told him that when Ryn left Cisco after he’d kidnapped her, Cisco had hugged her.
And the wrong eyes saw it.
Boone was really going to have to have a talk with Ryn about befriending bad guys.
But this wasn’t the end to that, Mamá having a chat with Cisco.
He just couldn’t push it with Hank and Eddie standing there.
“What next?” Auggie asked.
“Slim and Mitch are trying to create a list of cops that might have been close to Crowley who he might have shared with,” Hank said. “Problem with that is that Crowley didn’t have a lot of friends, and considering what it’s become clear he was looking into, he probably was so paranoid, he didn’t share dick with anybody.”
“And if whoever is behind all this didn’t know already, they know now because they instigated it, they’re on my radar. So we can move a lot freer in looking into shit,” Hawk said.
No one asked how they were going to move a lot freer, mostly because Eddie and Hank were there.
Both cops understood this, probably dealt with this kind of thing with Lee Nightingale and his crew all the time, so they didn’t waste a lot of time saying good-bye and taking off.
When they were gone, Boone didn’t waste any time re-huddling with Hawk and the boys.
“I just shared in front of two of Cisco’s crew that Ryn got a call from Cisco admitting to conspiracy to commit murder,” he reminded Hawk. “Someone tells a cop that, a dirty one or other, they get a warrant from a judge to look into her cell records, she’s fucked.”
“Her cell records have already been altered,” Hawk said. “Any record of that call was erased.”
Boone felt his brows go up. “That was fast.”
“Hawk phoned me too, muchacho,” Jorge said on a grin.
Another reason all the guys depended on Jorge.
When he was given an order, he did not fuck around.